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“No. No way. Absolutely not.”
It is fourth year, the Yule Ball is two weeks away, and it is currently the worst day of Draco’s life.
Because right now Draco has just been confronted by his friends about him totally not fancying one Harry J Potter.
“Draco this is gone on long enough, as your friends we are holding an intervention” Pansy’s hands are folded on her lap as she stares at Draco from the couch across from his. Next to her are Blaise, Greg, and Vincent, the traitors.
“I don’t need an intervention! I don’t have a problem!”
“Yes you do Draco!” Pansy states “You are so blinded by Potter that you don’t even listen to a word I say when he’s in the room! And then when he doesn’t pay attention to you, you get all mopey! You climbed a tree, for god's sake!.”
“You were so intent on ‘running into him’ the other day that you made me late for charms!” Blaise exclaims, “I had to sit next to Finnigan, Draco! Finnigan! I’m lucky I still have my eyebrows!”
“And so, as your friends, we are going to make you do something about it whether you like it or not. We are tired of your moping around like a lovesick sap!”
“I’m not lovesick!” Draco barks out, face as red as the howler Weasley received two years prior, “and for claiming you are all my friends you aren't acting very friendly right now!”
“It’s called tough love darling” Pansy smiles in a way that makes her nose look more piggish than usual.
“Ok, fine. Let’s say I do fancy Potter, which I don’t, how on earth are you going to make me ‘do something about it’?”
“You’re going to ask him to the Yule ball”
Draco barks out a laugh, because surely Pansy must be joking. The Yule ball?? It’s ridiculous and Draco will not be doing that.
“That’s ridiculous and I will not be doing that”
“We thought you’d say that.” Blaise chimes in, the two of them have always been trouble together, “However if you refuse to ask Potter to the ball than we are just going to ask him for you”
Draco’s not laughing now, ”What?”
“In order to motivate you to do something about your current predicament, we are going to take matters into our collective hands” Pansy gestures to the group, “if you do not say anything to Potter by the night of the ball then we will just have to tell him ourselves.”
“You wouldn’t”
“Oh, we would”
Draco suddenly remembers that Greg and Vince are here too, staying silent, Draco looks to them with a plea for help in his eyes, surely they aren’t going to abandon him in his time of need?
“Sorry Draco”, Greg says, not meeting his eyes, “You made me work on the badges with you so late that I missed breakfast, I was hungry all
morning!”
Realizing Greg would be of no help, he turns to Vincent, “Vince please...does our friendship mean nothing to you?”
Vince just shrugs, a man of few words.
Draco is at a loss of what to say, is there anything he could do to get out of this? Could he fake an injury? Could he tell his father? No, the only thing Draco can do is fling himself off of the astronomy tower and hope for a quick death.
“I don’t know why you all are so insistent, you know what his reaction is going to be.”
“Have confidence in yourself, Draco. You never know, and at least you’ll get an answer.” Pansy says as if that is comforting at all.
“You’ve got two weeks Draco, better start thinking of an opening line” Blaise motions to get up, and everyone disperses back to their dorms. Greg gives him an apologetic look as he leaves while Vince continues to have no expression whatsoever, leaving Draco alone in the common room.
Drsco falls back onto the sofa with a sigh. They are being so incredibly dramatic. Would they really tattle on him to Potter? About his horribly disgusting gay crush? The feelings that Draco had never planned on doing anything about because he knows that his father would disown him if he did. He tries not to think about it.
And the worst part of it all, is that despite all his denying, Draco really would want to go to the ball with Potter. He wants Potter to smile at him and offer Draco his arm. He wants to dance with the champions and for everyone to know that potter chose him. He wants Potter to take his hand and gently lead him off the dance floor, outside to the courtyard, and kiss him against a wall and never stop. Draco is a romantic.
Those feelings were discovered at the beginning of this year, Harry seeming to have grown taller and tanner over the summer, and his friends found them out quickly. He wasn’t exactly subtle, Pansy claimed the badges gave him away. But the real kicker was when Draco lent her his jacket on a Hogsmeade trip and she found a picture of Potter cut out from the Prophet. Draco vowed never to do anything nice for anyone ever again.
But even if he does fancy Potter, he can never admit to it. His Father hasn’t exactly had the greatest thing to say about gay people in the past, and Draco would prefer to stay out of that path of wrath. He will grow up and marry a nice witch and never see Harry Potter ever again.
But it was nice to dream.
—-
The next few days involved a lot of following Potter, staring at Potter, and promptly running away from Potter. Luckily, Potter has been too stupid to notice.
“Time is ticking, Draco” Pansy says on their way to potions, that they share with the Gryffindors, just his luck.
“I don’t know why you guys are so insistent, You know he’s going to laugh in my face. I’m simply trying to figure out the best way to do this that will leave me with as little public humiliation as possible.”
“You never know, he might surprise you”
Draco responds to this with a look on his face that says he does not believe her in the slightest. He won’t get his hopes up only for them to be crushed later.
“I’m just saying,” Pansy continues, “maybe your mutually antagonistic relationship has been mutual pining all along”
“I am not pining,” Draco snaps at her, because he’s not. In Draco’s opinion pining starts when you start having dreams about them, and seeing how it is only all of Draco’s waking thoughts that are being consumed by Harry Potter at the moment, he is not pining. Yet.
“So who are you going to the ball with, Pansy?”
Pansy’s face goes bright red, Draco knows she has someone specific she wants to ask her but she hasn’t told him who, although everyone knows she has been eyeing Theodore Nott ever since the welcome feast. At least her sputtering means that Draco has avoided any more nagging, a successful end to the conversation.
—
Hp
“Oughf!”
Harry is just leaving potions class when something hits him in the face, right between the eyes.
“You alright there mate?” Ron asks as they stop in the hallway.
“Yeah,” Harry sighs “something hit me” he picks the offending object off the ground where it had fallen, a small paper crane.
“What’s that?” Hermione pipes in from his other side.
Harry shrugs and shows her the crane, which she snatches right out of his hand.
She flips it around and looks at it from all sides, on the right wing there is finely written text reading open me, which Hermione promptly does even though it wasn’t even her head the crane had hit.
All three of them lean their heads together and read what’s written inside the crane.
Harry, please meet me on the quidditch pitch tonight at 8pm, I have something to ask you.
“A SECRET ADMIRER” Hermione shouts right in Harry’s ear.
Harry whips his head up and hastily looks around the hall again, looking for anyone with a big “I threw the crane” energy, but the initial rush of classes ending has cleared, making the hallway empty.
“This is so romantic!” Hermione continues, “I can’t believe it, it’s just like in the book Ginny and I just finished. Oh Harry you have to go!”
“She didn’t sign her name” Ron states the obvious.
“She’s probably nervous!” Hermione is now very excited, girls love this kind of romantic stuff. “You are the triwizard champion after all.”
“One of them..” Harry mumbles. He grabs the note out of Hermione's hand and stares at it as they walk down to the great hall, trying to decipher whose handwriting it could be. It’s all flowy and loopy, who could it be? Harry runs through every girl he knows through his head, finding it hard to even pick someone he would want it to be.
They pick up their walk down to the great hall, and if Harry can’t quell butterflies in his stomach, no one has to know.
—
DM
Draco hardly eats anything during dinner, he is so nervous he’s starting to feel nauseous, food turning to sand in his mouth.
“Pansy, I think I’m going to throw up”
“At least do it on Gregory” she doesn’t even look up from her meal.
“Tell my mother I love her” Draco can see Potter across the room, he’s surrounded by his Gryffindor friends, talking animatedly.
Most likely talking about his paper crane, Draco thinks, they’re all probably guessing who sent it, imagining a nice and lovely little witch, he’ll be so disappointed when he sees who it really is, Draco doesn’t know if he could stand it.
What will Potter do? Will he yell at him? Hex him? Will the great Harry Potter call him the same homophobic slurs he overhears his father use? Will he tell his friends what happened and have a laugh at Draco’s expense? Will the whole school know of it by tomorrow? Will the word that he’s a fag get back to his father? God he hopes not.
Draco knew his crush would end in heartbreak but he didn’t think it would be so soon. He had thought he would have a little more time of blissful ignorance. He’ll have to make Pansy buy him the chocolate he likes from Honeydukes as penance, the expensive ones.
“It’s been nice knowing you all” Draco says as he stands up from the table.
“Good luck, Draco,” Blaise waves from across the table with not an ounce of sympathy, Draco can almost buy Pansy doing this for better reasons but Blaise is clearly having fun at Draco’s expense, “do make sure to tell us how it goes”
Draco knows that it is not becoming to physically assault one’s friend in public, so he opts to give him two fingers, and walks out to the quidditch pitch and to certain doom.
—
Draco didn’t think he could get any more anxious, but as the minutes creep closer and closer to 8 he finds himself contemplating simply leaving and telling his friends Potter just never showed up.
He’s standing behind the bleachers, picking at the end of his scarf and ruminating on what to say, when he hears the sound of someone walking on the pitch.
“Confidence, Draco, you can do this” he whispers to himself before taking a deep breath and walking out onto the pitch.
He marches out onto the pitch, “Potter!”
“Malfoy? What are you doing here?” Potter looks confused, and scowly.
”I wanted t-“
But Harry keeps talking “Actually I don’t care, I don’t have time to fight right now Malfoy, I’m meeting someone and I’m already nervous enough as it is without you here”
“Oh. Um.” Every word Draco was planning to say is forgotten, Potter is going off book, how is Draco going to say the lines he planned if Potter is refusing to follow the script?
“Goodbye Malfoy.” Harry turns away to look around at the empty quidditch pitch.
“It’s me”
Harry turns back around, “What’s you?”
“Who you’re waiting for, It’s me. The paper crane, I sent it to you” Draco tries to keep his voice steady, and succeeds mostly.
Harry’s eyes widen for a split second before his face gets all scowly again.
“Oh great. Was this another one of you’re funny fucking jokes, Malfoy? Another badge making fun of Potter” Harry spits out his own name, “This is bloody ridiculous.”
“No, I’m serious. I was going to ask if you wanted to go to the Yule ball with me” Draco honestly can’t believe he’s doing this.
There’s a moment of silence, like Harry almost believed him, until he finally opens his mouth.
“As if I’d ever go anywhere with you, Malfoy. Now stop taking the piss and leave me alone.”
And just like that Draco’s heart is broken, crushed, eviscerated, just how he knew it would be.
And so Draco leaves. He doesn’t put up a fight or say anything nasty. He just follows Potter's advice and starts towards the castle.
Draco knows better than to hope Potter would stop him, ask him for some sort of clarification, follow him maybe, but it disappoints him all the same. The most he can hope for is the flicker in Harry’s expression as he leaves being a little more than just confusion.
Draco marches through the wide doors of Hogwarts, down to the dungeons, through the common room, and straight to the dorms. Pansy tries to ask how it went as he walks by, but Draco doesn’t even acknowledge her. Just keeps walking until he is locked away in the safety of his bed curtains.
He doesn’t cry. He doesn’t.
—
HP
“Do you think Malfoy’s been acting a bit weird the past few days?” Harry asks his friends in the library the next Thursday, two days away from the Yule ball.
Ron shrugs while Hermione asks “weird how?”
“I don’t know, he just seems…quieter, like he’s been avoiding me”
“Isn’t that a good thing?” Ron asks, yawning up from his book, “that he’s finally leaving you alone?”
“I guess, it just feels weird, like something's off.”
“Did anything happen between you two that would make him even want to avoid you?” Hermione asks, she’s much better at this than Ron is.
“Well, nothing really. The last time I spoke to him was when I went out to the quidditch pitch. When he pranked me with the crane, and when I didn’t buy it he stomped away, just typical Malfoy stuff.” Harry shrugs.
When Harry looks up, Hermione is looking at him like she’s thought of something.
“How did he prank you again?” She asks, “Did he make a show of it? Did he laugh at you for falling for it?”
“No, he really didn’t do anything dramatic really, just told me he sent it, asked me about the ball, and left”
“Harry…” she says cautiously, trying to piece together her sentence as gently as possible, “do you think, maybe, that Malfoy was telling the truth”
The butterflies jolt back in Harry’s stomach, “Whatdoyoumean” he says all at once.
“I mean, do you think that he was seriously asking you to the ball?” She says each word carefully. “No one else ever showed up right?”
“Yeah but, come on Hermione, this is Malfoy! Malfoy with the buttons and the my father, if he sent me the crane then it had to have been just another mean joke!” Right?
“Then why not just point and laugh instead of trying to convince you that he was serious? It seems a little out of the range of Malfoy’s usual taunting.”
“I don’t know hermione!” Harry doesn’t know why he’s getting so worked up, but he just can’t handle the thought that Malfoy was telling the truth. That would mean he would have to…have to like… “I think he’s being homophobic!” Harry slaps the table with his hands like he’s playing his trump card. “He’s trying to make me look gay and make fun of me! Just like Dudley and his stupid fucking friends!”
“Harry shush!” Hermione chides, looking over her shoulder for Madam Pince. When the coast is clear she leans in, forming a huddle with the three of them, “That doesn’t really make sense Harry,” she whispered, “He’s gay, after all”.
“What??” Harry shouts, this time not escaping a shushing from Madam Pince herself.
“Malfoy isn’t gay” Harry loudly whispers to the group, “I would know!”
“And why would you know more than anyone else?” Hermione presses, and Harry doesn’t know why so he doesn’t answer.
Hermione continues, “Anyway, I heard it from Parvati who heard it from Padme who overheard Susan bones telling Hannah Abbot who is potions partners with Millicent Bulstrode, who was talking to Daphne and Astoria Greengrass and they said that Malfoy was gay! Apparently, Astoria was really upset that Draco declined her invitation to the Yule ball even though she’s only in third year!” Hermione says that last bit with a huff.
“Even so, I still don’t think he actually fancies me!”
“I dunno mate, I think she’s right.” Ron finally chimes in, obviously holding in his laughter, “there’s no other explanation” he clearly thinks this is a hilarious misfortune that has befallen Harry.
“Thank you, Ronald” Hermione smiles at him
“Traitor” Harry mumbles under his breath. It still doesn’t feel right. It makes him feel uneasy, to think that Malfoy’s gay and might fancy him, in a way he can’t quite describe. Maybe he’s the one who’s homophobic.
“I don’t want to think about it anymore,” Harry declares as he stands up.
“Harry, if you’re going to storm off at least put your books away.” Hermione sighs
“Ugh, fine” he groans as he snatches up yet another book that didn’t help him with the second task, he was running out of options.
As he’s walking down the aisle, Harry hears a voice he recognizes almost instantly, coming from the other side of the shelf. Oh no.
“I’m really sorry, Draco.”
Harry stands still in the middle of the aisle, listening intently.
“We shouldn’t have pushed you. I shouldn’t have pushed you” Pansy’s voice is soft. “I really thought he would say yes.”
Harry hears a loud scoff followed by a voice he could recognize anywhere “And why on earth would you think that, Pansy.”
“I don’t know…” she trails off “I just..had this feeling. The way he looks at you sometimes…it seemed possible. Likely, even.”
“Well you were wrong and I was right, as always.”
Harry’s feet take him out of the library before he realizes it. Oh my god oh my god oh my god
So, Malfoy fancies someone. And used male pronouns. Malfoy fancies a boy. Malfoy asked this boy to go to the Yule ball and they said no. Harry is a boy. Harry said no. Oh my god
Harry knows it is about him. He knows it. Draco Malfoy had really meant it when he essentially asked Harry out and Harry said no because he didn’t know and-“
Harry stops in his tracks, catching himself. Would he have answered differently if he had known? He would have still said no right?
“Oh my god.”
—
It is fourth year, it’s the night of the Yule Ball, and it is now currently the worst day of Draco’s life.
Draco watches solemnly as the champions dance. Potter ended up taking one of the Patil twins, the Gryffindor one, of course.
He wishes he could just enjoy the ball and have fun like everyone else. He wishes he never entertained the idea of going with Potter, wishes he never let his imagination run wild with what ifs. He knew it could never happen, he shouldn’t have been so stupid as to let it effect him like this.
After the champions there’s the band and the dancing and the snacks and the punch that’s not even spiked. Pansy eventually ditches him to hang out with Millie and Potter is nowhere in sight. People meander through the ballroom and Draco is debating going back to his dorm when a crumpled paper crane lands in front of him.
Draco snatches it up fast and immediately rips it open.
Meet me outside.
His heart rate picks up as he tries not to think about the one person he desperately wants it to be, but who else could it be? Instead he walks straight out to the courtyard outside the great hall.
The second he steps outside he gets pulled into a dark corner. He looks up and is met with the bright green eyes of Harry Potter.
“You sent this?” Potter asks, holding up Draco’s note, although it feels more like a statement than a question.
“I already told you that I did.” Draco answers as he realizes that he actually doesn’t know if Harry’s intentions are good or bad.
“And you meant it? You meant what you said?” Harry’s eyes are so green.
“I-“ Draco’s not sure what the right way to answer is. Harry’s questions seem innocuous enough, but the way his eyes stare into him, how he crowds him into that corner so he can’t escape, the tone in his voice as he interrogates Draco, it’s almost threatening.
“Do you fancy me, Draco?” Harry asks the one question Draco can’t answer out loud.
Shame is not a fun feeling, Draco learns, he wears his emotions on his face as he avoids Harry’s stare.
“That’s what I thought” Harry says, taking the look on Draco’s face as the answer.
Draco waits for Harry’s reaction, for the disgust he’s sure he’ll find. But after a minute of silence, Draco looks up to find Harry staring at him, arms crossed, thinking.
“Well? What are you waiting for? Aren’t you going to say something?”
“Hold on im thinking”
“Thinking?? What do you possibly have to think about??”
“I want to try something,” Harry says, completely ignoring Draco’s extremely justified question.
“What?” Draco asks in confusion.
It’s at this point that Draco realizes how close Harry actually is, how quiet it is outside, and how little people are out here other than him and Harry.
“I said I want to try something.”
And with that Harry is leaning in and pressing his lips to Draco’s oh so gently, like he’s almost afraid.
So his intentions were good then. Draco recovers from his surprise quite quickly, if this is what Harry’s willing to give him then by god he’s going to take it, whether he knows the reason he’s doing this or not. He’s never kissed anyone before, but he follows his instincts and wraps his arms around Harry’s neck and leans into him, turning his tentative kiss into full on snogging.
Harry stumbles with the added weight, but catches himself quickly, hands reaching around his back to support Draco who’s practically resting all his weight on top of Harry.
Would a normal person stop and ask what’s going on? Perhaps. But Draco is a teenage boy who’s crush who he thought he never stood a chance with is suddenly kissing him, he should not be expected to act normal.
Draco continues to pepper kisses along Harry’s lips and face as he tries to pull away, not yet willing to give this up, if this is the only chance he’ll have to do this he wants it to last as long as possible. He eventually stops when Harry tells him to but keeps as close as Harry will allow.
“Ask me again”
“Ask you what?”
“Ask me to the Yule ball”
“I think I’d rather just keep kissing”
“Come on you berk, ask me again, properly”
Draco unwraps his arms from around Harry, “Harry Potter, I fancy you, will you go to the Yule ball with me?”
Harry smiles “yes”
And Draco can’t help it, his face lights up and he is so so happy, something he never thought he’d be. He launches himself back at Harry, stealing another kiss, although can you call it stealing when Harry willingly gives it?
Draco doesn’t know what will happen next, but as they hold hands and talk quietly to each other in the cold night air he thinks that this is the start of something great.
After all, they’re 14, what’s the worst that could happen?